"We should really check in Aktun."

"Huh. Yeah, guess so. Are Hagan and Vanyel even allowed -"

"I'm not sure. But we can bring the books back, that's allowed - Aktun is Abadar's domain in Axis."

“Er, why wouldn’t I be allowed?”

"Axis is by Abadar's will made safe for mortals aspiring to join him there, through the church. You're neutral good and more power to you, really, but it's a bit of an edge case? And it's not Abadar we'd be asking it's whichever colleague of mine decides things like 'hey can my adventuring party join the next tour group so we can petition for guidance about contact with another world' and they - I could imagine it ending up easier for just me to go?"

"They're not going to have a spot on their forms for it at all."

"You could put it that way."

“I’ll pass.”

"But I can look for more content on other worlds while I'm there. People there have more time, there's lots of good scholarship on worlds and planes and so on."

“That makes sense. Seems like a good idea.”

"All right. Mahdi, can I have all your pearls of power, Van can give you yours back and no one can give me mine back -"

"You may borrow them," says Mahdi, and hands over a steel bracelet in which they are carefully caged. 

Fazil spends a little while calling some of his spells back. "Okay, let's see this palace. Delay Pain."

With Delay Pain in place, Vanyel can Gate them back exactly to the place they just left.

And they can explore the palace. It has more statuary and ancient paintings and baths and shielded workrooms for practicing magic and a six-hundred-pound enormous crystal ball in a room full of divination-enhancing magic and a library where Mahdi stands stunned in reverential delight for a while even though all but one shelf of the books have crumbled to dust as their protective spells gradually failed.

Behind heavily trapped doors are what they can eventually identify as the palace's four throne rooms; Mahdi explains, after looking something up in a book from his cargo bag, that the four Pharaohs of Ascension were rival contenders to the throne who somehow agreed to a binding magical oath of cooperation, and then presided together over a long age of military expansion and the cementing of Osirion's power in the region. When one died they all did, though, so the age ended abruptly and left an awkward power vacuum.

"Kinda want to play with the crystal ball before we go for any of the throne rooms because I bet there'll be a fight and we might have to Gate out in a hurry."

"Is there a particular thing you're worried about? I should scope it out with mage-sight and try to take apart any constructs or trap-spells that're still functional, but if I'm careful it should be fine. Well. I guess I didn't see the water elemental coming, don't know where it was hiding." 

"Just - experience with tomb robbing. There's gonna be something in the throne rooms and it's going to be something that the tactics we've used so far aren't sufficient for, because the people designing it knew that if a fight made it that far then their enemy had unknown capabilities and 'more traps, more constructs' wouldn't cut it. We could get lucky and whatever it was it's no longer around, but I bet we won't."

"Right, that makes sense. I'll still have a peek, and I'll shield us before we go in. You can play with the crystal ball while I'm looking, might be a while." 

And he starts peering at the room behind one of the doors, with mage-sight and Farsight, and Thoughtsensing just in case. 

"Okay."

"Don't run it down -"

"Course not."

The room has lots of protective spells and trap spells on the door, including some making it impossible to tell with mage-sight or Farsight what's in the room. (Farsight thinks it's just solid stone.)

That's annoying but Vanyel isn't surprised; if anything, he's surprised it took this long to come up, shielding against mage-sight is commonplace in Velgarth. 

He warns the others. "Guess we're going in blind. Er, probably want you all to back off again while I disable the trap-spells again." He examines those more closely - what have they got this time? 

This will disintegrate him into dust and this will call an alarm and this will kick him two hours forward in time and this will teleport him to another location.